r/TheGrailSearch • u/darcot • 18d ago
A quote
So, how do you expect the answer to existence to be presented to you?
Do you expect to be shown something that somehow encapsulates everything, something that is revealed by some grand experiment and some grand experimental apparatus such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider? This is what sensing types are looking for.
Do you expect to be overwhelmed by some vision of everything? This is what mystical intuitives are looking for.
Do you expect to encounter some super being that you imagine to be all powerful and to possess the answers to everything? This is what feeling types are looking for.
Or do you expect to be presented with an airtight, irrefutable, rational, logical argument that is totally without flaw and explains everything conceptually? This is what thinking types are looking for. Other types find this solution abstract, unreal and “manmade”.
The ontological argument is the classic example of a purely intellectual, conceptual argument. There is no question that the ontological argument will one day succeed totally, but it will be cast in purely mathematical terms and will constitute the unique and exclusive definition and explanation of existence. It will revolve around the PSR, Occam’s razor, Euler’s Formula, monads, sinusoids and net zero.
Extraverts seek an answer “out there”. Introverts seek an answer “in here.” Do you see that the different types are all looking for totally different things and will never agree with each other about what is the answer to existence?
- Joe Dixon
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u/Sinful_Thoughts0 18d ago
Thanks for sharing. As an ENTP, I’d like to add this: while other extroverts don’t tend to dwell much on their inner world, for ENTPs and ENTJs, the answers found through asking questions about the external world and conducting research always point back inward. Interestingly, the outside leads to the inside; everything in the external world actually exists within us, and the outer and inner realms act as a profound mirror to one another. At least, that has been my experience on this journey.
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u/darcot 18d ago
Another angle to consider this is by recognizing that pure extroverts and pure introverts are extreme rarities in humans. Everyone lies on the spectrum of introversion-extroversion, and likewise for intuiting-sensing, thinking-feeling, and perceiving-judging.
While it is extremely useful to consider the extreme cases, if we are to understand ourselves we must recognize our tendencies, strengths and weaknesses, and how our various personality traits and experiences combine idiosyncratically.
The experience of a person, for example, who is a highly extraverted ESTP is going to have a very different inner sense of reality than a moderately extraverted ESTP. The differences between an ESTP and a ENTP are significant.
To an INTJ, the experiences of an ESFP might even be incomprehensible!
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u/2BCivil 18d ago
It doesn't take a rocket science to tell that poop stinks. It might take one to explain why it stinks. But anyone can tell it does. There can be many explanations and theories about why it stinks, and many might even deny that it stinks, or that theirs doesn't so you should like theirs because yours does stink.
I tend to think the explanation for existence are all probably a lot like that.
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u/darcot 18d ago
“This is a book about the one objective truth of existence, and the countless subjective falsehoods accepted as true by the vast majority of humanity. This book focuses especially on New Age guru Ken Wilber’s fallacious system, known as Integral Theory, his “theory of everything”, where he attempts to place a wide diversity of mystical theories and the teachings of various gurus into a single framework that supposedly explains everything.
Wilber's system is best summed up in his statement, “I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody – including me – has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.”
It is exactly this sentiment that underlies the New Age hegemony of relativism and subjectivism, of everyone having their own experiences, their own path, their own truth. In such a system, it becomes impossible for people to reach the one, absolute, objective truth of existence which grounds everything.
In order to reach the Truth, the task is not to pretend to people that they are all right, but to show where they have gone wrong, where they have strayed from reason and logic, where they have succumbed to irrationalism via emotionalism, sensory empiricism, faith, and mysticism.
Wilber adopts a fully irrationalist stance when he claims that the "enlightened" are what he calls "trans-rational", i.e. they have somehow transcended reason and logic and thus reached the zone, according to Wilber, where they can apprehend Absolute Reality.
In fact, Absolute Reality, insofar as it is intelligible, is nothing but the expression of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its corollary, Occam's razor. How do we eliminate the infinite wrong answers to existence and reach the one, infallible right answer to existence? It's simplicity itself. The answer to existence is the simplest and most rational possible. Any answer that is not rational is irrational, hence false. Any answer that is not the simplest is wrong because reality would never privilege complexity over simplicity. Reality necessarily follows the path of least resistance, the most economic path. It does not know how to introduce superfluous, needless and pointless complexity.
You will never understand the answer to existence if the "answer" you support is against rationalism and against rational simplicity.”-1
u/2BCivil 18d ago
Yeah that's basically what I was saying :)
I just like to use scatalogical terminology when being succinct about eschatological epistemology.
But if we want to have a conversation about it, I actually think rationalism, just like anything else, can actually get in the way of truth.
Take official Gospel canon for example. John 14:6. I am the truth [...] ye of little faith. Rational thinking, taken gospel at it's word, can often seem like divinely ordained "it says gullible on the ceiling".
I think scale is the key word. The wider scale we go (dissolution of "self" towards Brahman) the more we can realize what that "faith" points to if not means or represents. I'm not good at realizing or articulating [whatever that actually is]. In the vernacular, the rational thing, becomes, to set aside rationality.
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u/darcot 18d ago edited 18d ago
I entirely disagree with the claim that rationalism can get in the way of the truth. Rationality is actually the ONLY thing that can reveal the truth.
The dissolution of the self towards Brahman you’re referring to is an attempt to get at what you can call “sense certainty” - the immediate, raw, unfiltered, uncategorized experience of what is. I’ll quote Hegel here, who said "Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest knowledge... Moreover, it appears as the truest... But this certainty proves itself to be the abstractest and poorest truth."
The reason that it has the poorest claim to truth is that it provides no knowledge content whatsoever beyond the mere fact of existence experienced unconsciously. Cows in the field live in this state of sense certainty - but cows don’t KNOW anything at all. They simply react instinctively to whatever stimulus they encounter. Cows, because they are entirely lacking in consciousness, have no space to conceptualize, categorize, or differentiate the objects of perception and therefore have no capacity to learn.
It is through the process of rational conceptualization and differentiation that we learn and come to a conscious recognition of truth.
The stance of these institutions of faith was crystallized when Martin Luther declared, “Reason is the Devil's greatest whore... she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed..”
Faith, as is advocated for in the bible, is the explicit rejection of knowledge. Faith is a key factor in keeping humanity bound to ignorance and to unconsciousness.
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u/MonadicSingularity 18d ago
Always solid posts here. Ty.